Barn

Hightower Falls is a wedding venue located in Cedartown, Ga. and WOW. It basically has everything you’d ever want from a countryside wedding venue. It’s about an hour away from Atlanta. It has a waterfall. A real waterfall, not just a baby pretend 10 ft trickle of a waterfall. It has a barn (which is kind of required these days for countryside venues right?) It has RUINS. And not just the foundations and some pillars. It has an entire building structure of ruins. (Very stable too so don’t worry.)

What else… oh yeah it also has a few horses and a giant open grassy field and forests and trees. And a decent river creek area. OH and a wooden bridge. So yeah. Hightower Falls is kind of the perfect wedding venue if you’re looking for ANY of those things – or if you just want ALL of them. Because it’s nice to have options right?

One thing you’ll want to make sure you do – is schedule plenty of time for your photography. I’m not just saying that because I’m a wedding photographer – I’m saying that because you have SO MANY different and great backdrops for photos that you’ll want to spend more than 15 minutes on your portrait session. SERIOUSLYYYYYYYY. Look at this place!

Countryside Wedding Venue with a Barn & Waterfall

This is Allison and Nir’s wedding at the Homestead at Cloudland Station in Chicamauga, Ga.

Now – I’m sure that I say this a lot – especially to my clients ON their wedding days – but this was a perfect wedding. Literally. Not figuratively. Literally. From the weather to the venue to the planning crew to the caterers to the… oh yeah hey the Photographers ðŸ˜‰

Perfect.

This was the first time I photographed a wedding at the this venue but baby Jesus and Buddha – that’s a beautiful venue. And sure I’m just sucking up to the planners over at Soirées and of course the Homestead at Cloudland Station venue itself – but who cares because this wedding was that damn good.

It was SO GOOD that most of these photos are black and white because we got all kinds of f*cken artsy with things. And I can’t believe Allison and Nir hired me even with all the F-bombs all over this website! But yeah they did and me and my crew definitely had a great time working this wedding.

For some strange reason, over the past three or four years – I’ve hardly posted any full wedding type blog posts.

So I’m catching up this year. Nevermind that I apparently, literally have 104 weddings in queue to post – we’re going to get through them all!

So here – here’s Jade and Matt’s wedding that I photographed sometime last year. It’s amazing. They’re amazing. I post that exit shot EVERYWHERE and on EVERYWHERE’S MOM. Because holy baby Jesus and Buddha – LOOK AT THAT EXIT SHOT.

Plus – their wedding took place at one of my most favorite venues, anywhere. Sugarboo Farms in Blairsville, Ga.

Of course – when you’re an affordable North Georgia Wedding Photographer (SEO Alert) there are hundreds and hundreds of amazing wedding venues scattered all over this state. Still. About that exit shot. (Because I can go on and on and on about it.) – it took me almost 6 years to get that exit shot. Not just the opportunity – but also to know how to photograph it, in that moment, without thinking or blinking. Because the best wedding photographers will tell you – that sh*t is not in their control – stuff happens in front of them and hopefully their cameras were on the ‘magic’ setting (and then we brag about how we knew what we were doing all along.)

When Faith emailed us asking if we could photograph her wedding, she said two things – we were her first choice, and that she couldn’t think of anyone else she’d want as her photographer. Who can say no to that?!

Well – Faith & Jeromy’s wedding was on a Sunday – but I was scheduled to photograph a wedding the day before – IN MICHIGAN (this Friday’s upcoming wedding post.) Now – if you know anything about us and our photography business, we go all out – and we still love photographing weddings. So we told Faith that if she was okay with my flying in that morning (and all the risk associated) – then I was okay with signing up to be her wedding photographer.

So on that Sunday morning I woke up early to drive from Ann Arbor to hop on a flight in Detroit to get back down to Atlanta – so that I could drive straight up to the North Georgia woods to spend the rest of the day and evening with Faith & Jeromy. Have I mentioned how great their wedding was? How much fun we had? How awesome and crazy their friends are? No?

This is my friend Katie. And her brand-new husband Jamie! Katie and I trekked in Tibet together. Ate dal bhat in Nepal. Met the Dalai Lama in India. We’ve had some awesome adventures, because Katie and I are awesome people. And also because we did a Tibetan Studies semester abroad back in 2003.

Intense months of travel in developing countries can test a person, can wear you down, can make a not-so-nice side of you come out. But Katie doesn’t have a not-so-nice side. Or if she does, it’s buried so deep that even sickness, freezing temps, physical exhaustion, and a lack of hot, running water can’t bring it out. Katie is truly one of the sweetest, happiest people I know. So I was super excited when she asked us to come photograph her wedding at her parents’ horse farm. A.) Because I got to see Katie again and B.) Because I like events that celebrate really nice, happy people. Oh, and C.) because I like horse farms, too!!

So we packed up our gear and asked Intern Jo to come along (because being 28 weeks pregnant is not conducive to running around a horse farm taking photos), and we headed to North Carolina for a beautiful Labor Day Wedding Weekend. And we discovered that Intern Jo does nails! So she gave the bride a french manicure at the salon. (Like we always say, we are full-service photographers!)

And we took an obligatory mirror shot. With BabyRox.

And then it was time to get married. But first we asked Katie to hang her dress up in the barn. Cuz that’s what you do when you’re at a horse farm and someone is getting married.

Enough with the dress shots – Katie needed to get IN the dress. Which wasn’t quite as easy as one would hope….

Katie wasn’t sweating it, though. She’s a laid-back bride, and she’s got her awesome Katie sweetness. Plus, she looked AMAZING. And with some help from her mom and the bridesmaids, the stubborn zipper was finally fixed and Katie was free to see her Jamie and get married.

Oh! This cake was amazing. It was a comic strip! And 4 different flavors.

And we can’t forget the wedding chariot…

Congrats, Katie and Jamie. We had so much fun with y’all!! Thank you for a wonderful weekend, and for being so kind even when Mark made you take pictures in the grass with crickets hopping on you. Big hugs to you!

We met on a blind date in the fall of ’07, which was set up by two of our friends. We went out twice, realized the timing just wasn’t right and let several months pass by with no contact. Then, upon a chance (or not so chance) meeting at a local restaurant, we decided to try hanging out again. From that point forward (with only a few minor speedbumps:) it was love. It became a very long-distance love, but despite this, neither of us would trade the path that led us here for an easier one.

About Megan & Josh

They began dating in the summer of 2008, a few weeks before Megan left to travel to Africa for a month. Once home, they had only a few weeks together before Megan moved to Denver for her first year of grad school. Somehow they made it work with 2 thousand miles between them. They have now decreased those miles to 60, with Josh living in Macon and Megan in Atlanta. As they celebrate their wedding on May 15th, they will also be celebrating the beginning of an exciting time…actually getting to live in the same city for longer than a Christmas break!

We took a break this weekend. Kind of. See, we drove over to Birmingham, Alabama to attend a wedding for Leah’s cousin Allison to her man Ross. Since our friend Renee was photographing the wedding, we decided to ‘video’ a good bit of it (and since we have a hard time only attending weddings these days). The above video is a short, unedited clip (mostly) – and it’s THE REASON why you should consider hiring a GREAT wedding band instead of having only a DJ. I wish I knew what their name was – but they were honestly so awesome, that I’ll edit this post later and put it up.

We primarily shot our video using a Nikon D90 – which meant manually focusing the lens… but it’s alright because back when I started learning photography, I actually shot events with a manual lens from 1968 – so you either learn how to focus REALLY FAST, or you end up with way too many unusable and blurry photos. We have skillz. Sometimes (or we just get really lucky ðŸ™‚

The next day, Leah and I had brunch with the Leah’s family on her mother’s side.

And THEN we drove back to Atlanta, had dinner with her new-ish family (Leah found her birth mother) and celebrated her brother and cousin graduating from high school!

I miss my family out west – but it helps that Leah has 34 cousins (she recently counted) – and that means she has even more aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews. I think I’m going to make it my mission to have my picture taken with… EVERYONE.

Hey. This was at the wedding. Free drinks are FREE!

Have an awesome week. We’re gonna be posting like crazy. Weddings, Engagements, NonProfits, Newborns, and You.

We knew there was a chance that it was going to rain this past Saturday during Megan & Josh’s wedding. When we arrived it was just cloudy. About an hour before the ceremony, the skies let go and it was raining hard + thunder-storming. So we all waited. And then it rained… less. The photos might look like it was just a cloudy day, but I assure you – it went from a hard rain to sprinkling the entire day – and it almost never stopped coming down. Water was still coming down during all of these outdoor photos. Of course – that wasn’t going to stop Megan and Josh from having an excellent wedding day.

One of the things I enjoy about wedding photography is the pressure to deliver absolutely beautiful photos. I’m not talking about photos that are ‘good enough’ – or that just ‘cover’ the event. I want to make absolutely beautiful photos – because that’s what I want to give to the bride and groom – no matter what – even if I’m unprepared for rain and I don’t have a rain cover for myself or my camera – I’ll make one for my camera and I’ll just have to stand out in the rain (small price to pay for getting the shots I want).

I’m always telling our interns about how ‘restrictions’ force you to be more creative – well, the rain definitely forced that on us – not only in what photos we were going to shoot, but HOW we photographed them. Because you can’t spend forever taking formals if you’re asking people to actually stand in the drizzling sprinkle of rain in their fancy clothes. Heck, you can’t even go at a normal pace. You have to be really quick, know what you shots you’re going to take, take them and then make sure that they’re in focus, people’s eyes are open, direct the whole show AND you need to throw in some amount of creativity into the photos. Hopefully. Because ‘just getting the shot’ isn’t worth it if it’s not a shot worth looking at.

So I dragged everyone out walking into the rain to get to the small old barn at the edge of the property just for some photos, and I stood some people on a plow and had the flower girls pose on the bales of hay. Because I was there earlier and since portrait photography is 98% moving furniture – it might as well include moving farm equipment because that’s what I did beforehand, along with moving planks of wood, and the bales of hay.

It was a beautiful wedding and these are the preview photos. We can’t thank Megan & Josh enough for having us be a part of their wedding day.